Lesson 29 of 30

NuGet Packages and Project Management

C# in Visual Studio 2026 — a hands-on guide for developers at every level.

What is NuGet?

NuGet is the package manager for .NET. It hosts hundreds of thousands of open-source libraries you can add to your project with a single command or a few clicks in Visual Studio.

Installing Packages

Three ways to install a NuGet package:

Package Manager Console (Tools → NuGet → Package Manager Console):
Install-Package Newtonsoft.Json
CLI:
dotnet add package Serilog
GUI: Right-click project → Manage NuGet Packages → search and install.

Popular Packages

Package	Purpose
`Serilog`	Structured logging
`Dapper`	Lightweight SQL ORM
`AutoMapper`	Object-to-object mapping
`FluentValidation`	Validation rules
`Polly`	Resilience and retry policies
`CsvHelper`	Reading and writing CSV files
`Bogus`	Generating fake test data

Project Structure Best Practices

MyApp/
├── MyApp.sln
├── MyApp.Core/          # Domain models, interfaces
├── MyApp.Infrastructure/ # EF Core, file access
├── MyApp.Api/           # ASP.NET Core Web API
└── MyApp.Tests/         # xUnit tests

The .csproj File

<Project Sdk="Microsoft.NET.Sdk">
  <PropertyGroup>
    <OutputType>Exe</OutputType>
    <TargetFramework>net9.0</TargetFramework>
    <Nullable>enable</Nullable>
    <ImplicitUsings>enable</ImplicitUsings>
  </PropertyGroup>
  <ItemGroup>
    <PackageReference Include="Serilog" Version="3.*" />
  </ItemGroup>
</Project>

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